ry history. Of
the Muse it is most strictly and soberly true that "Bocca bacciata non
perde ventura, anzi rinuova come fa la luna." If there is any meaning about
the phrases of decadence, autumn, and the like, it is derived from the idea
of approaching death and cessation. There is no death, no cessation, in
literature; and the sadness and decay of certain periods is mere fiction.
An autumn day would not be sad if the average human being did not (very
properly) take from it a warning of the shortness of his own life. But
literature is not short-lived. There was no sign of poetry dying when
Shelley lived two thousand five hundred years after Sappho, when Shakespere
lived as long after Homer. Periods like the periods of the Greek Anthology
or of our Caroline poetry are not periods of decay, but simply periods of
difference. There are no periods of decay in literature so long as anything
good is produced; and when nothing good is produced, it is only a sign
that the field is taking a healthy turn of fallow. In this time much that
was good, with a quite wonderful and charming goodness, was produced. What
is more, it was a goodness which had its own distinct characteristics, some
of which I have endeavoured to point out, and which the true lover of
poetry would be as unwilling to lose as to lose the other goodnesses of all
the great periods, and of all but the greatest names in those periods. For
the unapproachables, for the first Three, for Homer, for Shakespere, for
Dante, I would myself (though I should be very sorry) give up all the poets
we have been reviewing. I should not like to have to choose between Herrick
and Milton's earlier poems; between the Caroline poets, major and minor, as
just reviewed on the one hand, and _The Faerie Queene_ on the other. But I
certainly would give _Paradise Regained_ for some score of poems of the
writers just named; and for them altogether I would give all but a few
passages (I would not give those) of _Paradise Lost_. And, as I have
endeavoured (perhaps to my readers' satiety) to point out, this comparative
estimate is after all a radically unsound one. We are not called upon to
weigh this kind of poetry against that kind; we are only incidentally, and
in an uninvidious manner, called upon to weigh this poet against that even
of the same kind. The whole question is, whether each is good in his own
kind, and whether the kind is a worthy and delightful one. And in regard of
most of the poe